


among these cold things

by fecktopia



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Loss of Faith, M/M, Postmortem, Unhappy Ending, Wakes & Funerals, after shane dies ryan tries to make contact with his ghost, graphic description of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-06 01:35:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13400688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fecktopia/pseuds/fecktopia
Summary: Maybe he can find him. Not in a physical sense, not something material and solid, but Ryan has held onto his beliefs for over a decade. If he can manage one thing in his insipid existence, then he wants it to be this.





	among these cold things

**Author's Note:**

> The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.  
> My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.  
> I love what I do not have. You are so far.
> 
> [Here I Love You by Pablo Neruda](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/here-i-love-you-3/)
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you to my beta [skepticsceptic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/PsychoNyx). They're lovely.

_He is a small ship upon an ocean of sadness. Each day is a new wave, a sudden crest to rock him further away from the shore. The news is a blow to the hull that has him taking on water. There are no patches or paddles. The boat will sink. He will drown._

_Moonlight filters through the cheap blinds that came with the apartment. His finger rests upon a button, dark skinned and steady. There is no more room for fear; the house is already filled with something else. Like smoke, it chokes its occupant; it obscures his view; it makes him breathless._

_“Say something.” He whispers, the pleading raw words of yesterdays are no longer able to claw their way up his throat to fall from his dry lips. The sound of static fills the room and radio waves carry a myriad of different noises to his hungry ears. None of them are the sound he searches for. “If you’re there, fuck, if you can hear me. Just… say something.”_

_Where once he felt capable of discerning the noises into something intelligible, where once his heart starved ears could find the echo of a voice, a reassurance of a far away forever- now, he hears only a jumbled percussion. He licks his lips. He turns off the machine._

_“I’m sorry,” he says to the empty room, to the nothing around him. To himself. Outside in the midst of a warm summer night there is no movement. There is not even wind._

 

* * *

 

 

It isn’t a call that anyone can prepare themselves for. Ryan is bleary eyed and half asleep, reaching out into the darkness to grasp his glowing, chirping phone. “Hello.” He says, and then the world shatters.

 

Later on the earth will reform itself, but it will come back all wrong. Tectonic plates will have shifted across the divide of the ocean, the space between here and there will be further away. Smiles will be slow forming, glacial and uneasy. Colors will become muted, flavors will fail to be as rich. Ryan’s phone shatters along with the rest of the world, when the news reaches out across almost a continent’s distance, long traveled from tower to tower like a medieval call to arms. The words penetrate his eardrums and he knows nothing but the coiling inside his chest and the certainty that it cannot be true.

 

He throws his phone across the room and distantly hears its collision with the wall, and the clatter it makes when it lands on the fake hardwood laminate of the floor. He breathes deeply, but the it seems that the air cannot make its way to his lungs. For a brief moment, everything feels lighter, like he is gaseous, like he will just float away.

 

Then he’s gasping in great gulps of air, pin pricks of light dotting out his vision. A part of him is unaccounted for, still drifting higher and higher. It slips through the ceiling and dissipates, fading away like breath on a mirror. Ryan stays grounded if only in a physical sense. He flips on all the lights in his apartment and splashes water on his face. The entirety of his body tingles as he scoops up his broken cellphone and entertains a world in which it could be true.

 

When the phone fails to come back to life, he pulls out his laptop and facetimes Shane’s brother. The other man is ragged, looking ten years older than the last time Ryan saw him. The image of Finn like that is the awakening of a greater understanding, even if part of him is still rallying against the impossibility, the unfairness of it all.

 

One day in the near future, he will ask how it happened, what chain of events could have formed the world in which he now lives. And the thing is, the sad sick fact of the matter, it was startlingly simple. One moment Shane was stepping off of a curb and the next he was blown away like a leaf on the wind.

 

Ryan chokes on his own heart but he does not cry. He ends the call with condolences slipping off the tip of his tongue, with a numbness gnawing from the surface of his skin to the marrow of his bones. His guts remain knotted for all the days that follow.

 

With a ringing in his ears and a movement that is not his own he will claw and crawl his way into the shower and let water that is far too hot beat down on him as he tries to feel something beyond the echo of emotion that drums its way inside his skull.

 

As the day of the funeral draws nearer, as he makes adjustments and plans, as he books a flight and turns in paperwork for a sabbatical, Ryan begins to realize things about grief that no one ever told him, that no one ever took the time to explain. Grief is so very mundane. It is not crying in a downpour, or the dirge of a long goodbye. Or, at least, it is not only those things.

 

Grief is finding someone else’s sweater and coming to the sudden realization that he will never be able to return it. Grief is Ryan sliding his spare key into the lock of an apartment that is now empty, that will always ever be empty. It is a half-finished episode on a Netflix queue, a stack of dishes left only partially done by the sink. Grief is the many tiny fragments of a life being lived, all dropped in a sudden haste.

 

Ryan meanders around the apartment that holds the entirety of Shane’s life, and without meaning to, he ends up hoarding small bits of it for himself. Not anything grand or expensive, not anything that would hold value to anyone but himself. Ryan takes Shane’s favorite coffee mug, the dog-eared paperback by his bedside, and one of the photos held to his refrigerator by a magnet. A picture of them together. Ink and paper, lights and refraction; to Ryan, photography is somewhat like magic. He knows how to work a camera, but doesn’t pretend to know how they work. Ryan thinks about videos on the internet, and a thousand snap shots on an Instagram feed. He thinks about the ability to capture a moment of time, to record a person’s face and voice and mannerisms. He wonders, in the long run, if it even really helps.

 

Even as it becomes clear that there is no punch line to this horrible joke, the reality of the situation does not set in until Ryan is packing a bag for his flight to Illinois. Intrusively the thought slips in; like a thief, it invades the sanctuary of his mind. Ryan thinks about how long it takes for a body to decompose, and the thought is so jarring and springs up so suddenly that he has to close his suitcase. He has to sit down. Ryan’s heartrate speeds up, his palms sweat. The air becomes stale and thin.

 

He cries for the first time, hunched over the edge of his bed, face buried in his palms. He had wanted to cry when Shane’s brother had given him the news, but the shock of it all had seen him smashing his phone and falling into a numb despondence. He has a new phone now, a replacement. He tries not to think of how there will be no replacement for the hip that had shattered on impact, no replacement for that thick skull that had fractured upon contact with the pavement.

 

Ryan had been awake at midnight on the night of the accident. He had been playing a video game, trying to unwind after a long week. Shane had sent him a text, not anything terribly important, not anything of substance. Ryan’s phone had gone off fifteen minutes past twelve, and he had looked at it briefly before going back to his game. He did not text back. The accident happened just before one in the morning. The written record the coroner’s liaison officer had sent to Shane’s parents had been explicit in its wording.

 

 _Cerebral hemorrhage due to basal skull fracture on left due to automobile accident on July 23, 2017._ _Deceased was struck by an automobile about 1 mi. west of Vista Hermosa Natural Park. Initial impact with the vehicle caused fracture to the ischium of his right hip, and caused the ilium of the hip to shatter. The Deceased was thrown approx. 7 ft. from the site of the collision, and upon impact with the ground sustained the basal skull fracture. He was unconscious when picked up, never regained consciousness, and died at 4:25 a.m. Accident happened at 12:45 a.m. / / Nothing of value. Lacerated scalp over occiput._

 

Ryan reads over the pdf that Finn emailed him so many times that the words become emblazoned on the back of his eyelids. Over time they start to form an image and Ryan begins to regret ever asking for the details in the first place. Slumped at the foot of his bed with burning eyes and cheeks that are sticky and tacky with spilt tears, Ryan regrets every instant of his life leading up to this moment.

 

But there is one moment in particular that makes him wish that he could melt into the earth’s core and reside there for forever.

 

* * *

 

 

The hotel room had been dark and hazy, though that was probably just his perception at the time. Ryan had been drunk. They had both been drunk. The room had been cramped, just a last minute booking after their original arrangements had fallen through. Two twin beds stretched out across from one another within the small confines of the room. Ryan was laying on the mattress that he had called dibs on, the one closest to the bathroom, and Shane had sat on the floor between the two beds. His long limbs had been arranged in a manner that had to have been uncomfortable, his knees tucked up to his chest, and his arms lax by his side as they both laughed at something stupid that Ryan wouldn’t be able to remember in the future despite furiously racking his brain.

 

Shane, inebriated and loose tongued, had paused suddenly in the midst of his peals of laughter. He had looked up at Ryan where the other man was laying with his head dangling half off of the bed. The soft glow of a table lamp had been the only light source in the room, and ribbons of yellow fluorescents had illuminated half of Shane’s face. A curious panging had started somewhere in Ryan’s heart, a discordant beat that had Ryan curling in further on himself as cold, crippling fear replaced the warmth that had flooded his system at the sight. Ryan bit his tongue.

 

Their gazes had locked, and even though the twisting in Ryan’s guts had become almost unbearable, there had been something bright in the other man’s gaze. Something suddenly serious and almost somber. And then Shane had said it, so solemnly and resolute that Ryan hadn’t been able to think that it was anything other than the truth. His stomach fluttered, the same queer sensation that had spread through him just moments before, and he had to fight the abrupt inexplicable desire to cross the space between them. To scale the distance that suddenly felt too vast and too empty, but then the fear was kicking back in. Ryan rolled his eyes. He chuckled. There was an uneasiness to his voice, to the way he folded his limbs back onto the mattress so that he was staring at the ceiling.

 

He emphatically did not think about the creases at the corners of Shane’s eyes, or the way his spit slicked lips had begun to curl downward as Ryan turned away. After a few long moments of awkward silence Shane had stood up and slid into his own bed, cutting off the lights with a swift flick of his hand and plunged the room in darkness.

 

The following day they both pretended that it had never happened, and the disappointment Ryan felt made his own feelings become clear, even to his denial addled brain. As time wore on he promised himself that he would be braver, that he would not let a moment pass him by like that again.

 

* * *

 

 

Ryan is on an airplane and all he can think about is that the last time he had been on an airplane, Shane had been with him. Ryan wonders how they moved his body from LA to Chicago. Had they put him on ice? Shane had always liked the cold, had said it was an east coast thing. Ryan thinks about them swapping his blood with formaldehyde, and how his blood doesn't even exist anymore. Just medical waste, something washed down the drain. He tries not to think of Shane’s blood and how it had stained the pavement outside of some stupid fucking burger joint. How his big dumb head had cracked like an egg. Humpty Dumpty. They could never put him back together again. Ryan thinks about formaldehyde and how kids dip cigarettes in it to get high. He wonders if he could ever get high enough to forget this feeling.

 

The stewardess comes around every so often, and Ryan gives into the urge to drink, to coat his waking hours in veil of alcohol. He has already arranged to pick up a rental car from a place next to the airport, but he doesn’t want to think about the not so distant future. He will arrive in Illinois just before evening sets in, and in the morning he will be going to a funeral. He’ll have missed the viewing by the time he gets to his destination, but he was asked to be a pallbearer during the actual ceremony. It should be an honor, to be there to help bastion Shane away on his very final journey like some saddened purveyor of death, but all Ryan feels when he thinks about it is sick sense of dread.

 

From what Ryan has read about the kind of head injury that ultimately killed his friend, they probably would have needed to shave Shane’s head to try to get to the damaged area. Ryan doesn’t want to see him like that, everything literally stripped away; his body turned waxy and plasticine from the embalming process.

 

Ryan gets drunk. He doesn’t intend to do so, had merely wanted to relieve some of the aching inside of himself when he downed the first drink. But one turns to six and then six turns into too many to count. It doesn’t even work, the alcohol does nothing to erase the gnawing nagging pain that churns through his guts and coagulates in his throat like curdled milk. Something splashes against the screen of his IPad and Ryan realizes belatedly that he is crying again.

 

Despite the fact that it feels like an ice cream scooper is tearing chunks out of his chest, Ryan feels stupid and embarrassed. The old woman next to him puts a comforting hand on his shoulder and asks him, in broken English, if he is okay. He shrugs off her hand, feels chills running down his spine. Words roll off of his lips without his permission, and before he knows it, he’s having a full blown breakdown.

 

The same stewardess that has been refilling his drinks brings him a bag to breathe into, and there are eyes on him as he gasps and gags. Like a stray dog starved for attention the thought comes to him that Shane will never breathe again, that his lungs are now still and will continue to be so. Oddly enough it’s that train of thought that makes Ryan stop crying. It is not a pleasant feeling. The sadness has nowhere to go and so it sits and rots inside of him, like black tar on the lungs, like a metastasized tumor. It’ll mold over and stagnate, but Ryan doesn’t know what to do with it.

 

In that moment he hates Shane. Just a little bit. Just enough for the guilt to come down like a sudden sickness. Love grows in him like an unwanted parasite. The cause of it has been irradiated, but it continues to spread and infect. The weight is too much. The host cannot support it. Ryan feels like he will choke from the intensity of the feeling. But, unable to cure himself of this affliction, it begins to fester. Not unlike grief, love eats away at him, and with Shane gone there isn’t anywhere for it to go. There isn’t anyone to give it to.

 

Numbness falls upon him. Ryan switches off his IPad. He asks the stewardess to bring him another drink, and yes, he’s fine. It will help to calm him down. People on the surrounding rows pretend that nothing has happened, like the world hasn’t fallen away. Someone snickers. Most just avert their eyes. The embarrassment ebbs, the guilt drifts off into the evening sky. The feeling of love seems to calcify inside his chest, but it does not leave him. He does not think that it ever will.

 

By the time the plane lands, and by the time he is stumbling his way to baggage claim, and by the time he is sitting behind the wheel of a rental car Ryan realizes that he is far too drunk to follow his GPS. Much less drive. He apologizes to the man behind the counter, but he does not get refunded. He calls for an Uber and when the girl who picks him up tries to make idle chit chat he doesn’t even hold the pretense of trying to follow along.

 

She gives him a tight lipped smile when she drops him off in front of his motel, and even though he had paid through the app, he drops a twenty into her center console and mumbles out an almost incoherent apology.

 

Chicago feels wrong. An uneasy fit. Shane had tried to goad him into going there once, but Ryan had shot him down. It doesn’t feel right for Ryan to be here without him, but then again, back home hadn’t been any better. Ryan checks into his motel room with his hand white knuckled around the handle of his rolling suitcase.

 

The night sky is bright and lively. There are so many stars for his eyes to latch onto. For the briefest of moments Ryan thinks about heaven, but then he finds himself inexplicably panicked and has to cease that line of thought.

 

He sets an alarm for five in the morning, and stretches himself out along the cheap mattress of his motel room. His eyes are heavy lidded and swollen by the time that he finally falls to sleep. In a perfect world he would not dream.

 

This world isn’t perfect.

 

* * *

 

 

_He had fancied his beliefs to be immutable. Something hard pressed and unchanging, but currents bash against rocks and even they’ll wear down over time. He is the last harbor in a storm. He is a port. The waters are rough, but he thinks he can sail them. He doesn’t look for the horizon._

_The board in front of him is a last ditch effort. He doesn’t need much. Something simple. Some semblance of a sign. “Please.” He whispers, back to the begging. The pointer doesn’t move. He is almost unerringly calm. If he works hard enough, if he concentrates for just enough time, if he can believe with all of his heart and implore with all of his will…_

_He sits there for a very long while, fingertips pressed to the bit of plastic, sandpaper scratched eyes staring at the configuration of letters. The earth continues to turn around him, but he is still stuck in a long gone lifetime. A softer world._

_The numbers on the clock flip away one by one. Eventually his hands fall from the board with no pretense of following the rules. It does not make a difference. The dead offer no answers._

_In the gloaming of the early morning, his apartment remains silent._

 

* * *

 

 

In the following days, Ryan feels absolutely nothing. He walks with the funeral procession with empty eyes and a heart that barely seems to beat. The knotting in his guts does not loosen, but it seems to come from somewhere far away, like something outside of himself. It’s a closed casket service, and Ryan doesn’t know if that is better or not. The last time he saw Shane the other man had been smiling, and a little slack jawed, folding his long limbs into the backseat of an Uber. It’s probably better to remember him that way, Ryan had been dreading seeing his body anyway.

 

A morbid part of him is disappointed, under the impression that it could bring about some kind of closure. It doesn’t feel real, even as his hand wraps around one of the handles of the casket and he helps to heft it out of the hearse. Part of him feels like any moment Shane will call him, or update his Instagram, or come around the corner with a witty remark. Ryan hates to be suspended in that area of bitter resignation and the yearning for a different truth. He used to think there was magic in the world. He wonders how he could have been so wrong.

 

After the funeral he follows the surprisingly small group of people back to Shane’s parent’s house for the wake. Ryan avoids the alcohol because he remembers the way that he felt the day before, and the blankness that he feels is a welcome reprise from the earlier ache. He studiously avoids speaking to Shane’s parents, save for a few awkward apologies. It’s too much. Too raw. Every iota of emotion is etched into their faces. Looking into their eyes is too much like looking into a mirror. Ryan feels like an interloper, like he doesn’t quite have a right to be here. This is Shane’s family, and Ryan was not ever brave enough to muster up the strength to say just three simple words to the other man. Knowing now that he will never get the chance to do so does nothing to ease the pain, and Ryan has come to prefer the nothingness that echoes off of his hollow heart and burrows around somewhere within his bones.

 

Startlingly, the sensation of suffocation arises and Ryan has to excuse himself. He holes himself up in the small half bath tucked away in the back of the first floor. He splashes his face with faucet water and finds himself staring as beads of liquid disappear down the drain. He doesn’t quite know how to go back out into the small throng of people, how to mingle and trade stories as though it’s perfectly normal, as though the entirety of everything has fallen apart. He wants to be back home in Los Angeles, wants to crawl between his sheets and cover his head. He wants to rewind, to go back to a month ago, to last week even. He feels guilty. He wasn’t able to do anything, wasn’t able to keep the world upright before it all came crashing down.

 

He wasn’t there when Shane died, but he has revisited it every night since. In dreams he can do the impossible, like bringing the dead back to life. It’s then that the seed plants inside his brain. Just a kernel of an idea, a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak existence. Maybe he _can_ find him. Not in a physical sense, not something material and solid, but Ryan has held on to his beliefs for over a decade. If he can manage one thing in his insipid existence, then he wants it to be this. More than anything he wants to believe, to _know_ that his friend is still out there somewhere. That he isn’t gone, not forever.

 

Even as he thinks it doubt begins to creep in around the edges of his psyche. Maybe doubt isn’t the correct word, it’s something closer to fear, but Ryan knows fear and the feeling is far more maudlin than that. It’s a creeping sensation, cloying and draining, and Ryan clambers out of the bathroom to come face to face with Finn. After a moment of shock passes between them, the older man offers Ryan a mirthless smile, just a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Hey.” He says, and his voice is hoarse. Ryan returns the gesture, but his grin fairs no better, just a pursing of his lips like an unconscious muscle spasm. “Hey.” He responds, gaze dropping down to where his dress shoes are scuffing at the nice tiles. “How are you holding up?” Ryan asks, one hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck.

 

“I’m…” Finn starts, before giving a dismissive flap of his hand. “Well, I’m here.” He finishes, mustering up a wry grin. Ryan finds himself incapable of meeting his eyes. He looks so very much like his brother, but different enough that it’s somewhat jarring. “Yeah.” Ryan murmurs, eyes fixating on something in the distance. “What about you?” Finn questions, and when Ryan looks up he seems to be just as incapable of holding a gaze.

 

“Don’t worry about me.” Ryan tells him, maybe too defensive. “I mean, he was your brother. You should be focusing on your family right now.” Ryan says, and doing so makes everything seem too real, like this is going to be forever. Finn chuckles, a despondent sound. “Yeah. He would hate me if I didn’t make sure you were alright, you do know that right?”

 

Ryan does know that, at least on some far away intellectual level. Ryan knows that he would want someone to look after Shane if it had been him to check out early. “I guess, yeah.” Ryan tells Finn, a huff of air leaving his parted lips. “I’m going to be in LA next week,” Finn says, apparently out of nowhere. Ryan must look confused enough, because he hastily trails himself with, “To pack up his apartment.”

 

Ryan tries not to think of a building that had felt far too empty when he stepped inside. He doesn’t think of the photograph tucked into his luggage back at the motel, about its crinkled edges and the overexposure in the corner. “I’ve taken some time off of work.” Ryan tells him, “If you think you’ll need help.”

 

Finn offers up an actual smile at that, barely there but still real. Relief seeps into the lines of his face. “Yeah. I’d… That’d be great.” He says, and makes an awkward movement to get into the bathroom. Ryan is standing in the doorway, blocking his entrance, and they dance around each other for a moment before Ryan offers an apology and slinks away.

 

He doesn’t want to help, not really. He doesn’t want to step into that apartment and see all of the things that Shane has collected be boxed up and carted away. But it also wouldn’t feel right to _not_ be there either. Despite the fact that Shane is dead, Ryan still feels beholden to him, responsible for him in a way that he never really was to begin with. That reality does nothing to change how he feels, the desire to do something.

 

He is not able to stay at the wake any longer, and he offers another round of condolences before making his way back to the motel. The overbearing pressure is lessened with the change of location, but he still feels as though the earth is continuing to collapse in on itself. He still feels as though the entire infrastructure has been compromised. He does not have the knowledge or skills to repair it. In the morning, the sun will rise.

 

Ryan cannot help but envy it the ability.

 

* * *

 

 

_The navigation is knackered, his sense of direction has been skewed. He does not know where he is going, does not know what course will have him finding his salvation. His heart is world weary and worn, it cannot bear one more disappointment. Sleep is an elusive lover, but when it does deign to wrap its arms around him, he finds himself rallying against it. He does not wish to slip into those death like trances. He once had nightmares. He would awaken sweat soaked and thrumming like an electrical current._

_Now, sleep when it comes holds only promises that cannot be kept. The nightmares had been better. He does not want a taste of a fruit that he can never consume, would rather wander around outside of paradise, a man marked by his own madness. And, if he is truly mad, then this is the source._

_The psychic had not drawn out anything of worth. Pretty words had fallen from her lips, and each one had been like a cannons bombardment. The ship is now in tatters, is now somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, and he braves the crushing sea on his own. He had thought that he would be able to find some semblance of sanity in a reality that he can no longer believe in. He has searched and he has scoured, he has exhausted all of his resources._

_And like a loved one, his beliefs are returned to the earth. He had held so tightly, had clung for so very long, and now he lets them fall from his fingertips. He feels like the ocean is dragging him down into its murky depths. The warp and weft of the tide has caught him in its clutches, and he no longer knows how to fight against it. No longer knows if he wants to. He is so very tired, and the water is relentless._

_He takes a deep breath. He goes under_.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic sprang up because I noticed how many fics had Ryan dying and becoming a ghost, and coming back to haunt Shane. I wondered what the inverse of that would be, and this is the monstrosity that popped out. If you liked the story I'd be ever so grateful if you left a comment. I mean even if you don't like it, leave a comment and tell me why. Thanks for reading.


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